A used car salesman named Randy Adams has jumped ahead of me in Google search ratings. A tattoo artist by the same name has almost always been ranked higher. Both are from Texas. In the past few months, a Silicon Valley bigwig and I have leapfrogged up and down in the Randy Adams’s ratings. As CEO at SearchMe.com, an “entrepreneur who has founded 6 venture-backed start-ups” in Silicon Valley, it’s surprising that he doesn’t own the first 10 search results. His Kavam.com spider, Charlotte, is sure making its rounds of the web. The CEO’s LinkIn profile lists him as an Internet Pioneer. Shades of Davey Crockett ploughing the earth with his rifle. In the mythologic sense, the tattoo artist and I are more pioneer-like, in appearance and aesthetic. I’m pulling for the tattoo artist. Go Randy Adams, go.

I remember once, a few years ago, my name ranked first. But the rating lasted barely two days. The tattoo artist moved ahead and stayed there. There are other Randy Admases: a guitar player whose ‘69 Impala once held all his possessions; some fellow from an “independent audio company serving churches and ministries in the USA and around the world”; RAC, Randy Adams Construction (I wanna piece of that); a 6′8″ basketball player for the Sacramento State Hornets; a parenting specialist counsellor who asks if you are “giving in, instead of standing your ground?” with your teenagers (as if standing in front of a train barrelling down a hill is a conscious choice!); Klamath Radio’s Program Director, a self-proclaimed jock; a Katrina Evacuee described as eloquent and open: “He had humour, humility, and an eye for detail” (they must have him mixed up with me); the past president and executive director of the Saint Louis Symphony; and a man appointed Chief of Police for the City of Glendale on January 31, 2003 (belated congrats).

AND:

But my hat goes off to former death row prisoner Randall Dale Adams, who was wrongly convicted of murder and spent many years in jail. At a legislative hearing on the death penalty, Adams said: “The man you see before you is here by the grace of God. The fact that it took 12 and a half years and a movie to prove my innocence should scare the hell out of everyone in this room, and if it doesn’t, then that scares the hell out of me.” He has vanished from the first 10 search results for Randy Adams.

If you add the word art to the Randy Adams’ search string, the first 5 or so links relate to my media practice, followed by the tattoo artist. I used to worry about these Google rankings and would spend hours re-jigging the source code of my web pages. Now I check my stats every so often just to see how people have arrived at my website. The search strings include: “there’s one single seal on my left a lot of activity”, “woman’s kaiser chief t.shirts”, “free tamil full movie on you tube” “frozen banana knife”, “electronic marinators”, “graffiti virus”, “homeless signs”, “hippie signs”, “barbed wire” and “love notes”. Out of 131631 hits in May from 7150 unique visitors, most people arrive here by accident, searching for something else. There are a few returnees, like thepsychopath at free forums, a helicopter vendor from lipostuff, someone from singingfish, and assorted folk from myspace and friendster. Someone from Ireland keeps re-visiting my essay on the bogus speech by Chief Seattle, and someone from Calgary (I have my suspicions) visits regularly.

If you include the hits from R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX, a collaborative media blog hosted at my web address, the hits come from media artists and interested people from dozens of countries and educational sites. But most people who visit pages on my personal blog rarely bore down to the main page: here. So I’m mostly talking to myself. It’s just me and Charlotte the web spider. If I want my name to be popular on Google, I need take up something more practical like selling cars or maybe developing an online gambling site. Until then, I’ll have to be satisfied with people looking for electronic marinators or a frozen banana knife.

In art and poetics, some things never change.

Transdisciplinary Digital Art: Sound, Vision and The New Screen
Edited by Randy Adams, Steve Gibson & Stefan Müller Arisona

Transdisciplinary Digital Art: Sound, Vision and The New Screen is a collection of papers from two parallel conferences: Digital Art Weeks in Zurich and Interactive Futures in Victoria, Canada. The term transdisciplinary distinguishes the practice from the older term, interdisciplinary, because the latter term implies a certain detachment between mediums. Transdisciplinary on the other hand suggests a level of direct connection across mediums. This acknowledges that there are varying levels of skill, but also states that transdisciplinary work engages practitioners in unique fashion, where each participant strives to better understand necessary processes and concepts at more than superficial levels. From the technical to the philosophical to the poetic, the papers in this collection cover a range of topics related to digital tools and the creation of expressive digital works. The volume, as a whole, furthers an understanding of and an engagement with our apparent transdisciplinary future.

“…the visual poetry which our learned professors have been hiding from us all these years because it confuses their neat pictures, but that’s another story.” Dick Higgins, from the preface to Artist’s Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook (1985).

“The need to both validate my own work and to inquire into the strong prejudice against acknowledgement of the visual component in literary work put an emotional spin on the intellectual project.” Johanna Drucker, from The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art , 1909 – 1923 (1994).

[original code by babel - from [xy]happens[dance] revisited]

A weeping willow on our property was damaged during a spring snowstorm. By sheer luck the weighty branches missed a house and a power line. The now unbalanced tree is being pruned down to a sad stump. An arborist said the tree was about 80 years old. It was a neighbourhood icon, graceful and dramatic. We hope the tree will sprout again. The hearty breed grows sometimes 10 ft. a year.

The weeping willow species originated in China, but was misnamed Salix babylonica by the botanist Linnaeus, because the trees grew in profusion along the Euphrates. Some scholars believe that Sumerians made whistles from the leaves of weeping willows. It is said shepherds played soothing melodies on those reed whistles.

The weeping willow tree has fostered many popular mythologies, each with its requisite smidgen of truth. Popular myth has it that Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744) grew the first weeping willow in England. He is said to have planted a budding wand from a basket containing figs that a Turkish lady admirer had given him. Another version of the story says that Pope happened to be with Lady Suffolk when she received a parcel from Spain. He observed that it was bound with green twigs, which looked as if they might vegetate. “Perhaps,” said he, “these may produce something that we have not yet in England.” One source says that the famous weeping willow in Pope’s garden died in 1801 and the remains were made into relics. It has also been said that it was destroyed by some person as barbarous as the reverend gentleman who cut down Shakespeare’s mulberry tree - because the owner was annoyed at persons asking to see it.

Psalm 137 reads - By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof - which immediately gives rise to visions of weeping willow trees. A couple of thousand years later, the poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) wrote:

I hang my harp upon a tree,
A weeping willow in a lake;
I hang my silent harp there, wrung and snapt
For a dream’s sake.

This is obviously a reference to Psalm 137. But the trees in question may have been poplars. According to Wikipedia, “the tree named gharab in early Hebrew, is now known to have referred to Populus euphratica, only later (by the time of the Protestant Reformation bible translators) also coming to refer to willows.”

Not that it really matters, aesthetically.

Rossetti would certainly have been influenced by Lord Byron (1788 - 1824), who was also fond of weeping willows. In Don Juan, he wrote:

Her face declined and was unseen; her hair
Fell in long tresses like the weeping willow

Down through the ages, writers, artists and musicians have found inspiration in the weeping willow. It is said that Orpheus received his gifts of eloquence and communication by carrying willow branches on his journey through the Underworld. It likely wasn’t weeping willow, but he surely wept when Eurydice vanished back into Hades.

The weeping willow was a source of inspiration for the founder of French impressionism, Claude Monet. Hans Christian Andersen’s dryad is overcome by “A weariness that increased continually […] She felt a longing to rest on the soft Oriental carpets within, or to lean against the weeping willow without by the clear water. But for the ephemeral fly there was no rest. In a few moments the day had completed its circle.”

Through funerary art and archetypal symbolism, weeping willows are associated with sorrow and death - carved on urns, gravestones and temples. Napoleon spent his last days at St. Helena under the shade of a weeping willow, and was buried under the tree. Cuttings from that tree were planted in many countries. It is said that Captain William Francis Lynch obtained a cutting from the tree and presented it to US President Andrew Johnson. Supposedly, it now stands in Greeneville, Tennessee, where Johnson is buried. The gravesite of George Washington is said to once have had a tree from Napoleon’s grave - “Disturb not his Slumbers let Washington sleep Neath the Boughs of the Willow that over him weep.” Some people believe that all the weeping willow trees in Australia are descended from cuttings taken from Napoleon’s site.

The distinctive droop of the weeping willow variety has given it a special place in mythology - especially in modern, popular mythologies. From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Johnny Cash, the weeping willow has played a role. And, in his everyman fashion, Cash managed to sum up the entire sense of the tree:

Now I taught the weeping willow how to cry, cry, cry,
And I showed the clouds how to cover up a clear blue sky.
And the tears that I cried for that woman are gonna flood you Big River.
Then I’m gonna sit right here until I die.

R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX